Ebook Project: Promotion Using Web 2.0 Sites

In my last post I talked about using web 2.0 sites such as Squidoo as a promotional tool to drive extra traffic to an existing site. Part of my project plan for the ebook project was to setup a Squidoo Lens, write an article for EzineArticles and perhaps a few others.

Content Topic Selection

A few days ago I reviewed an ebook called Instant Money Reports which teaches how to earn an income from writing reports or ebooks. In that review I mentioned that a lot of attention had been given to the subject of proper topic selection and this is also very important when developing content to be hosted on web 2.0 sites like Squidoo.

If I write a post on this blog, I can base my topic around pretty much anything and I know the article will get read because I have an existing reader base. This is not the case with web 2.0 content. There are only a few ways to ensure that the content you develop will be seen:

• Optimise it well for keywords to get search engine traffic
• Make it so damn good that it is ranked in the ‘top spots’ for that site
• Develop a ton of content, become a famous author

Let me just explain those last two options for a moment. Taking three major web 2.0 platforms that I am interested in - Squidoo, HubPages and EzineArticles, all three have some kind of ranking system for the content and the authors of that content. If you manage to produce exceptional quality material you may get featured in this way but it is rather like trying to get on the front page of Digg - don’t bank on it!

The more reliable method is to create your content such that it is targeted towards a high traffic / low competition keyword phrase. Basically, we do the standard SEO practice but we host the content on the web 2.0 rather than on our blog / website etc. The idea is that the content ranks well in Google helped along by the authority of the domain on which it is hosted.

Problem Number 1 - What Do I Write About?

When I first put together my project plan the idea was that I would trawl through my ebook and take a couple pages here and there and re-write the content into a series of smaller articles. I would then use these articles as my topics for the web 2.0 content.

However when I started to read through the ebook I realised that this strategy was flawed because the book is written in a linear fashion designed to be read in the order that it was written and each chapter builds upon the one before it. For example, chapter 4 on AdSense relies on the reader having installed the exact theme that I talk about in Chapter 3.

The other problem was that many of the chapters when taken on their own simply were not that interesting! For example, the first chapter is about installing WordPress and a quick Google search will reveal a ton of articles that tell you how to do this already. This means that I can’t really add any value by releasing that chapter on its own. Really, the ebook is only useful when read in its entirety - it simply does not work as a collection of individual articles.

So my second approach then was to condense the whole process of using WordPress to create niche sites into a single article like I had already done in my discussion of a money making strategy using WordPress. The problem with this approach is the same as the one I faced when doing the bum marketing project - do I upload the same article to all these sites or do I re-write it for each one?

Okay with the bum marketing project the problem was bigger because I wanted to submit a single article to potentially a dozen or more article directories and for this project I only want to use a handful a web 2.0 sites so re-writing a few times is not a huge deal.

Problem 2 - Competing With Myself!

Another reason why I wanted to write different articles is because that approach would have allowed me to target different keywords for each article and therefore attract a potentially larger amount of search traffic.

Because I am going to have to re-write a single article, I’m likey to be using the same keyword phrase for them all. But here is the real problem - after a little bit of keyword research the keywords I was looking at were “niche sites wordpress”. When I typed this into Google, I was flooded with results promoting my own ebook!!

If I target that keyword phrase I would literally be competing with this very blog, and many other blogs that have promoted my ebook over the last week or so and that is just silly! If I managed to rank in the top 10 for example, then it means that I would be pushing down somebody else’s post that is already driving me traffic!

This problem highlights the importance of proper keyword research. So instead I’ll be targeting “niche marketing” rather than “niche sites”. It’s a somewhat more competitive term but at least I wont be competing with myself!

Now after all of that research I actually ran out of time so I still haven’t created the content yet! That will be my first job next week and I’ll post the links to the pages I build and explain the various technicalities behind each one.

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